Have you ever heard or read about knitters using Adobe Illustrator to layout charts, draw schematics, create technical drawings, and annotate photos? If you did, did you go and look up Illustrator and then have a heart attack when you saw the price tag? If you did (and even if you didn't), Inkscape is a viable, freeware, opensource alternative. It doesn't have some of Illustrator's bells and whistles, but it has other features, including it's handy grid feature, that make it more suited to creating knitting charts than Illustrator.

(I personally love saving my charts as .pdf and then using them with LaTeX or inserting them into other pdf documents. The image quality rocks! The .png default for File > Export Bitmap is nice too.)

The best thing about Inkscape (other than the price tag and the large community)...It runs on just about any platform. The vast majority of Linux systems, Windows, and Mac can all run Inkscape without any difficulties and it comes prepackaged for each of these systems. (It also looks the same on each system. A major boon for those of us who swap between OSes regularly, running one on one computer and another on our other. (eg. Ubuntu netbook and Windows desktop))

Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, and Mandriva all have Inkscape in their repositories. Unless you're feeling adventurous, this is the best way to install it.

For everyone else, hop over to Inkscape.org and download it directly.

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• Knitting and Typography